Go, Cubs, Go!

Well, whadda ya know, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series after being down 1-3 and pulling off a come-from-behind victory that took us all the way to extra innings in game #7 (after a weirdly brief rain delay between the ninth and tenth).

I’d been rooting for them all summer long. They were like the anti-Twins. We lost 103 games (a franchise record) and they won 103 games (awesome).

But when the World Series started, I found myself rooting for the Cleveland Indians. Which makes some sense — a fellow AL-Central team. And things looked good until game #5…

After the first two games, in Cleveland, it was 1-1. Then the Indians took the next two games in Chicago! Cubs fans were bumming, but then the Cubbies won a close game #5, and the worm turned.

They came to Cleveland and decimated the Indians in game #6 (9-3). That was hugely upsetting; now the Cleveland fans were bumming.

Game #7 was better fought, but that Cubs home run in the first inning stung. The Indians manage to tie it in the third, got behind again in the next inning, managed to tied it up, again, in the eighth, and kept it tied through the ninth.

Then it rained a bit, and they put the tarp out.

For only seventeen minutes.

Then the Cubs got two in the top of the tenth, and while the Indians managed to answer with one in the bottom of the frame, it wasn’t enough.

The Cubs won the World Series for the first time since 1908!

Go, Cubs, Go!

(As to why I switched sides during that last game… Well, I realized who Ohio was likely to vote for next week compared to Illinois… and that kinda did it with me for Cleveland. Sorry guys, you’re backing the wrong horse, so no World Series for you!)

Oh, Lady Di, I’m afraid you’re reaching for something that isn’t there. That I switched allegiance from Cleveland to Chicago shows I wasn’t terribly invested, so the pleasure (or pain) is fairly trivial. And for all the joy of dedicated fans in Chicago, there’s an equal amount of misery for the dedicated fans in Cleveland. Ultimately, it’s a wash.

A baseball game, in the end, is just a baseball game, no harm done, and tomorrow brings a fresh new chance to win or lose again. Who wins the World Series will not affect, in any way, the nature of our world.

This election will, and it demonstrates in no uncertain terms a point I’ve been making for a very long time: It is a huge mistake to let our emotions guide us. We see in this truly existential moment the crucial importance of education, intelligence, and rational thought.

Unfortunately I live in a world badly lacking in those things, and I’m quite frankly terrified.

Yes, I know; 108 years, to be exact. Did your news also mention the people of Cleveland? It’s been 68 years for them, so for most living fans of baseball, that drought is equally long. Including the Indians fans makes it a Yin-Yang situation — kind of a wash. I can’t take that much pleasure from Cubs fans knowing that, for every person in Chicago, there’s a matching person in Cleveland. (Even my pathetic Minnesota Twins won the W.S. in 1987 and 1991, so 1948 is a pretty long time ago.)

What’s terrifying about the election isn’t that it’s almost over. It’s what this election cycle says about what’s happening in society and how it reflects a bad path we seem to be on. The election is a symptom of a very sick society.

I’ve been seeing this happen for the last four or five decades — the rising currents against science, education, intellect, and rationality — the elevation of opinion as fact, of emotion as thought — these things are slowly destroying us. I’ve been watching it happen all this time, and I’m now seeing it bear its awful fruit.

The election isn’t a thing that will pass, Lady Di. It’s a sign of the times. That’s what terrifies me. I see the small gains we’ve made since the Dark Ages being lost. The Pumpkin Goblin is nothing. It’s his followers — the “movement” — I fear.

I hear ya Smitty. When all else fails, sometimes humanity has to go to a pretty a scary place to knock some sense back into them. For those around at the time HOLY SHIT but for future generations they’ll say look how advanced we are now when they look back and man those people were idiots and then a few generations later the whole cycle happens again. not comforting for you and I but…

Yes, absolutely, history has cycles, but the entire history of humanity has larger trends as well. For instance, the population of the world just continues to grow. So does our technology.

And I’m coming to believe that humanity is not a viable product long term. It works fine in tribes or villages or cities or even states (or nation-states), but not once populations grow above the many, many millions.

I’ve long wondered about the viability of the USA… how is it even possible to successfully govern a country with such diverse regions as the “deep South” and the Northeast and the Southwest and the Midwest and even the Northwest. These regions have sensibilities that are at odds with each other.

Trying to govern such diversity results in piss-poor results for everyone (and often just deadlock… such as we’ve experienced these last eight years and will again with a woman President).

These problems are all the more magnified when talking about the entire planet!

So, definitely not comforting for you or I… in the sense of millions are likely to die and many more to experience great suffering. The species won’t be wiped out, of course, but it may very well get knocked back to another Dark Ages.

And if that larger cycle is the best we can do, then there is really no point to humanity.